This interview is part of a series related to Block Club’s 2025 B2B Tech Brand Readiness Report.
When Qualified made the bold decision to completely pivot their company around an AI SDR agent named Piper in 2024, they weren’t just adding AI features to their existing product—they transformed their offering, positioning and messaging, and helped to create an entirely new category. In this conversation, Maura Rivera, CMO of Qualified, sits down with Block Club to discuss how the company navigated this transformation, the strategic bets they made on personification and category creation, and why she believes brand must be treated as a “living, breathing asset” in the age of AI. From their highest-traffic launch day ever to watching customers create their own personified agents, Maura shares the playbook for how B2B companies can move beyond slapping “AI-powered” on their homepage to building genuinely differentiated positions in an increasingly crowded market.
Block Club: Let’s start with the big picture. How has AI changed the game for B2B marketing teams, and what does that mean for brand strategy?
Maura Rivera: There’s absolutely an imperative right now for every department within every organization to embrace AI to move faster. But from a brand perspective, you can’t crawl or walk into positioning yourself as an AI-first company, you have to approach it head on.
In 2023 and 2024, everybody just slapped “AI-powered” on their homepage H1. AI this, AI that. But buyers are smarter now. You have to be able to back it up with not just AI-first messaging, but an AI-first product. Those two things go hand in hand.
BC: Qualified made a dramatic pivot from conversational marketing to AI SDR agents. Walk us through that decision and how you approached such a fundamental shift.
MR: We were born as a live chat company competing in the conversational marketing space. But with the emergence of AI, we made the decision to totally pivot the product we’re selling, our positioning, everything.
In April 2024, we launched Piper, our AI SDR agent. Our board was actually pretty bullish on personifying the agent, making it feel like someone you can hire onto your team. It brings us into this whole narrative of AI isn’t just a tool, it’s a teammate.
With 88% of tech companies now using generative AI, we’re witnessing a fundamental shift in how products get built. Development cycles that once spanned quarters now can take as little as a few weeks. Features that required specialized expertise in the past can be propped up with AI assistance.
We were one of the first to say “AI SDR,” and it turned heads. Launch day was the highest traffic we’ve ever had to our website. There was an intrigue and a hook about this. Our CEO said, “We’re onto something. Go, go, go.”
BC: The personification of Piper is fascinating. Many companies struggle with how human to make their AI. What drove that decision?
MR: We spent a lot of time on this. We named her Piper because she generates pipeline. But here’s the real story: we actually modeled her after our best SDR we’ve ever had, a woman named Blake who’s now our director of sales.
When we were designing Piper, we kept saying, “She’s got to have pipeline goals. She’s got to be super smart about go-to-market data. She’s got to know the right time to surface the right offer. She’s got to be elegant when inviting folks to book a meeting.” We kept saying, “She’s got to be Blake.”
So we named her Piper, and she looks like Blake. She’s the AI version of our best SDR. If you’re going to personify, you have to have a real story behind it, not just a random face and name.
BC: How did customers respond to this approach?
MR: The cool thing is, many of our customers who’ve hired an AI SDR agent have personified it to match their brand. Brex named their agent Brexton. Box named theirs Bella. Greenhouse named theirs Daisy because they’re all about plants.
It’s become this fun marketing exercise. It starts to feel like an extension of the team, not just some fluffy AI shelfware that you’re going to turn off. We couldn’t have predicted how warmly it would be received. It was weird at the beginning, but it worked.
BC: You mentioned moving from conversational marketing to AI SDR agents, and now you’re pushing into “agentic marketing.” How do you think about category creation and evolution?
MR: The AI SDR agent category is pretty crowded now. G2 just published an AI SDR category and report. But it still needs some further definition, because there’s an inbound AI SDR piece (which is where we focus) and an outbound AI SDR piece. So AI SDR is familiar and crowded, but looking forward, we see marketing automation as the old way of thinking. Agentic marketing is going to be the new way. If you look at Google search volume, “AI SDR” is searched for way more than “agentic” right now, but we’re betting that will change.
BC: With such rapid evolution, how do you maintain brand consistency while constantly pushing forward?
MR: It’s something that keeps me up at night. When you’re a company that’s been around longer, sometimes you have more baggage like old pricing, old ways of showcasing your product. Newer companies have an advantage because they can start from scratch.
The only way to operate is to look at your brand as a living, breathing asset. I look at our website as living and breathing. We should always be tweaking and evolving it. Same with our sales deck. How is our narrative continuing to evolve?
Marketers can’t live in the world from 10 years ago where you do a brand refresh once a year and call it quits. You have to be in lockstep with your product team, influence the roadmap, and think about how you’re going to weave that into all of your marketing materials.
BC: You’ve had to overcome the past brand legacy of who you were just a few years ago. How did you manage that transition with existing customers and prospects?
MR: We’ve always been focused on marketers—CMOs, VPs of demand gen—and we’ve always had the same core mission. You’ve got a pipeline target, how are you going to hit it efficiently? That North Star has always been the same. What’s evolved is our technology.
We used to support that story through human-to-human interaction on the website. Now we support it through an AI agent who manages all of your inbound and can do all the email follow-up. The core remains the same, but making this move, you have to be really bold with your new positioning and not tiptoe into it.
When we go into sales calls, we acknowledge, “Hey, you might know us for this. But before we jump in, let us level set. We’re onto a much bigger vision right now.” We have billboards everywhere that say we have an AI SDR agent. You have to be loud and proud with your new claim.
BC: What marketing strategies have been most effective in driving this transformation?
MR: Thought leadership and customer stories are the two we lean into the most. For thought leadership, we host big virtual events where we bring on heavy hitters with a point of view on how marketing is transforming in the land of agents. We had an AI Workforce Summit about how autonomous workers are going to augment humans. We had thousands register for our AI SDR Summit.
It’s not about talking about our product, it’s about discussing, “How do I think about bringing AI SDRs onto my team? How can they work well with humans? How do I hold them accountable?”
If you go straight to talking about why your product’s great, nobody cares. You have to uplevel it and say why is this an exciting movement. Then you make the connection. “Oh, Qualified’s leading the narrative, they have a point of view, they’re the experts.”
BC: How important are customer stories in this landscape?
MR: Customer stories have to be the loudest voice in the room. Right now in the age of AI, we talk about the haves and the have-nots. The haves are the companies that have proven product-market fit and customers in production.
In 2026, the AI winners that emerge will be the ones who have successful customers in production. I come from a background in customer marketing. I’m the biggest believer in customer storytelling. I want everybody at our company to be able to fire off five great customer stories at the drop of a hat. That’s what will separate out the fluffy AI companies from those that succeed—they can constantly tell stories about how they’re making a dent in people’s business.
BC: Any hot takes on where marketing is headed in the AI era?
MR: Here’s a controversial one: I think some roles in go-to-market organizations are going to go away, and I think that’s okay. There are some roles that people didn’t want to do anyway, and agents are going to take those over.
Also, I’m finding more inspiration from AI-native agent companies than from the big dogs I used to look up to. I’ve been looking at true startups who don’t have dense websites with a million SEO landing pages. They’re starting with really simple, interactive sites that are more inspired by a brand like ChatGPT than what B2B websites looked like years ago.
BC: Final thoughts for marketing leaders navigating this transformation?
MR: Kraig Swensrud, our founder and CEO, was previously CMO at Salesforce. He’s obsessed with how to push the envelope, how to stay relevant from a storytelling perspective, and how to always showcase our latest and greatest. We do big launches frequently. You have to be launching, relaunching, evolving all of your brand assets, or else you become irrelevant in this fast-moving landscape.
The Qualified AI Playbook: Key Takeaways for Marketing Leaders
In Block Club’s conversation with Maura Rivera, CMO at Qualified, several principles emerged for executing a bold AI transformation without losing your core identity:
- Commit to absolute transformation: Don’t add AI features—completely reimagine your product and brand. Qualified pivoted everything except their core mission and target audience.
- Personify with purpose: Ground AI agents in real stories. Qualified modeled Piper after their best SDR, giving customers a framework to create their own personified agents.
- Create the category, don’t join it: Be first to define terminology. Host movement-level events about industry transformation, not product features.
- Treat brand as a living asset: Institute quarterly messaging reviews, monthly website updates, and continuous testing. Your competition moves too fast for annual refreshes.
- Make customers your loudest voice: Every employee should know several customer success stories by heart. Build events specifically for customers to share wins.
- Acknowledge the past, own the future: When facing legacy perceptions, address them directly then immediately pivot to your new vision with proof points.
The Takeaway: Don’t just slap “AI” onto your homepage or messaging system. Build an AI-first product, create a category around it, and let customer success drive your narrative. Most importantly, treat your brand as a living asset that evolves as fast as the market demands.
This interview was conducted as part of Block Club’s research into how B2B brands are navigating the AI transformation. For more insights from marketing leaders shaping the future of B2B tech, follow our ongoing series and download our 2025 report B2B Tech Brands Have Conquered Product. Now What? surveying 60 VPs and CMOs from leading B2B tech companies.